Tag Archives: WWDC

This morning Apple sent out invitations for the annual World Wide Developers Conference and opened up ticket sales, which cost $1599 each. It’s a safe bet that those tickets will all be sold out today if not almost immediately, last year all of them were gone within about 12 hours.

The event will be held over the course of 5 days, June 11th through 15th, at Moscone West in San Francisco, CA. According to Apple the focus this year is on both OS X and iOS, with over 100 sessions led by Apple engineers to assist developers in understanding and working with core Apple technologies and services.

There has not been any announcement yet about the keynote, but we expect it will probably be led by Tim Cook with multiple Apple executives taking the stage for specific presentations. Read more

Today, Apple will present several new products to its third party developer community…and through the tremendous press scrunity — not to mention what Steve Jobs recently called (an undesirable) “nation of bloggers” (ahem) — by extension the larger world of its users, enthusiasts and curious potential ‘switchers.’

Some of them will be software, some will be hardware, but most if not all will likely manage to attract their own little cyclonic orbits of controversy.

Here are some of the grapevine’s expectations; stay with us over the week ahead for post-event analysis and fresh dirt on what’s next from Infinite Loop. Read more

Though many readers have reported the problems with Safari 4.x on Leopard, few of the same issues were reproducible by testers/developers and sources who have hands-on access to the latest post-WWDC builds (10a380 and later) of Snow Leopard.

We’ve noted the considerable boost to Safari 4 performance that users of Mac OS X 10.6 build 10a380 have experienced in previous posts to our Twitter feed, and it would appear that a similar difference applies to many of the stability problems readers have been reporting with 10.5.x, even after the recent Safari 4.0.1 Update is applied.

In fact, in several cases, it would appear that v4.0.1 actually made some of these issues worse. Paradoxically, though the 4.0.1 Update package is not available for Snow Leopard (requires 10.5.7) and 10.6 is still almost three months away from release with plenty of system-level bugs left to be fixed, virtually all testers we talked to were left scratching their heads in surprise when attempts were made to reproduce the widely reported crashes/misbehavior on 10a380 or more recent builds. Read more

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Last Updated: 3:15 EDT(newest updates at the bottom) — Live Coverage is now complete. This is an archive of our postings as of 3:15 PM; more can be found in other posts here on Rumors or by following us on Twitter.

From our Twitter feed: Several readers at the Moscone Center have noted that banners there show the iCal logo w/ the date June 19th…a release date?

Also noted by many attendees on the banners is a new Quicktime X logo. Read more

Breaking reports coming out of the lines waiting for entry into the WWDC 2009 Keynote (media has just been admitted in the past few minutes) suggest that Steve Jobs may have been sighted entering the Moscone Center via a side entrance approximately one hour ago.

Stay tuned to Rumors for updates on this breaking news and ongoing LIVE Coverage of WWDC 2009 here on the Web and also from our Twitter feed, @MacOSRumors!Read more

As Rumors has previously reported, we expect an entirely new family of iDevices to be shipping by the end of the summer — and although expectations for an announcement of new 2009 iPhones are running high today, the actual shipping date of those new phones is most likely at least a few (3-4?) weeks in the future.

We also believe that at least one other group of iDevices, most probably and expanded/upgraded iPod Touch lineup, will be announced today….with at least some models paralleling the feature set of the high-end 2009 iPhone, including:

*One proposed marketing name for the new iDevices was “iPhone/iPod Touch X2,” denoting the “twice as fast, twice as much, twice the features” advancements over 2007/2008 models….

In the case of iPhone OS 3.0, we already have a fairly good idea of its feature set, performance, and reliability from the series of developer betas that have been released over the past several months. Although Apple has not yet made an official statement as to its final release date, there has been none of the hedging that we’ve seen with Snow Leopard; we wouldn’t be surprised to discover that some type of delay, or a “Final Beta” similar to Snow Leopard’s, will be announced today….but the most likely outcome is a release in the near term if not actually today.

Obviously, we’re very excited about that and we know all of you are as well. If we’re forced to wait for one more round of debugging to be carried out and for developers to test their apps against a set of new features, we’ll live…but many things about the dev process thus far, and the state of the mobile operating system itself, suggest that a release is imminent without significant further delay. Read more

As Rumors has previously reported, numerous indications from within the source code of iPhone OS 3.0 Beta releases….industry leaks from suppliers….and Infinite Loop itself as well as reports from reliable sources all over the planet all converge on a few relatively widespread fact-based predictions:

*At least three distinct 2009 iPhones: “3Gx2” or “3.5G” high-end model with enhanced specs & full support for AT&T’s new 7.2Mbps “Enhanced 3G” cellular data network….an entry-level model more or less the same as today’s iPhone 3G with mostly cosmetic changes and a few tweaks (possibly Bluetooth 3.0, among others), and a third “International” model designed for certain markets such as China which have unique cellular networking standards/requirements.

*Within each model family, there will be at least two pricing/value tiers based largely on storage space (but possibly also storage performance, in some cases); in approximate terms, 8GB 3G $99 — 16GB $149 (3G)/$199 (3.5G) — 32GB 3.5G $299, with a possible additional 64GB tier at $399. Read more

Normally Mac OS Rumors is not in the business of making completely firm predictions even when based on the most reliable and fact-based “insider” information….too much can, and often does, happen between the prototype stages we’re privy to and the actual announcement day.

For example, our predictions of first-generation Macbook Air models with CPUs clocked at upwards of 2.0GHz were based on the numerous prototypes (Steve Jobs once publicly stated there were over one hundred [!] distinct Macbook Air prototypes with widely diverging specifications) and only after the announcement did it become clear such prototypes would have been unstable at the higher operating temperatures of those faster Core 2 mobile processors with the Air’s limited cooling hardware. Not to mention uncomfortably hot to the touch! Read more

It is already widely believed among rumor-mongers — with very good reason, based on the extensive source reports we’ve received on this specific detail — that at a minimum, the high-end 2009 iPhone will sport a new CMOS imaging sensor (“camera”) with 3.2MP photo capabilities and video output far superior to that of current 2007/2008 iPhones which only support video functionality when Jailbroken, and even then with poor image stability/quality/framerate.

The latest wave of rumors on the grapevine take this several steps further, suggesting that at least some type of camera will be included across all 2009 iDevices including the new iPod Touch and the much-speculated-upon “fourth iDevice” (entry-level iPhone, high-end iPhone, iPod Touch, and “iTablet” or similar).

Rumors’ sources have led us to go even further out on a limb than that in our predictions: based on the latest reports to come out from under source embargo, we believe that every 2009 iDevice with a camera will have some form of video capability, and most likely will be at least 3.2 megapixels for photographs/1280×720 (720P HD) video resolution. Read more

Some have speculated, based on varying degrees of “insider” information, that all iDevices (current 2007/2008 iPhones & iPod Touch models as well as upcoming 2009 iPhones, iPod Touch models and an all-new iDevice sometimes referred to as ‘iTablet,’ ‘iPad’ or ‘iPortal’ which will compete with Tablets and “Netbooks”) running iPhone OS 3.0 when it ships this summer may have more than just the “background notification” features announced at the iPhone OS 3.0 Preview Event in March.

Specifically, several rumor-mongers have suggested that certain apps — either a specified number (two [2] is the most frequently mentioned figure), or a limited range of application types which would fit certain requirements to be “pre-approved” for background-tasking capability by Apple’s AppStore managers.

Neither of these fits very well with Infinite Loop’s style, nor are they consistent in any way with the information we’ve received from our own “insider” sources. Read more

Apple has posted the Mac OS X 10.5.7 Update package to its Software Update servers, weighing in at a hefty 449MB just for the incremental update from 10.5.6. Combo packages are also available both for the standard (729MB) and server (951MB) variants from Apple’s Downloads Page.

Readers are encouraged to report on any problems or changes.

From release notes for the standard Delta Update package:

What’s new in this update?

Address Book

* Improves reliability of Address Book syncing with iPhone and other devices and applications.

AirPort

* Improves the reliability of AirPort connections, including improvements when roaming in large wireless networks with an Intel-based Mac.

Client management

* Improves reliability of synchronizing files on a portable home directory.
* Fixes an issue in Mac OS X 10.5.4 and 10.5.5 in which managed users may not see printers that use the Generic PPD.

Despite recent comments (both public and private) by Apple to the effect that the company intends to stay focused on GSM cellular network technology — rather than CDMA, Verizon’s technology of choice — for a number of reasons, notably international adoption of GSM over the alternatives….a towering new tidal wave of rumors on this subject were sparked over the weekend by USA Today.

A solution to the problem of CDMA (EVDO for 3G data) versus GSM would be a jump straight to “4G” technology, something that Infinite Loop is reportedly working on quite aggressively for its 2010 iDevices (not just iPhone!) which will include cellular data-network connectivity. It would also open the door for Apple to also work with the #3 network behind AT&T and Verizon: Sprint, the most aggressive adopters of 4G to date. Read more

Despite being a mere 21 builds apart from the previous seed, 10A314, released earlier this month….the latest Snow Leopard seed (simultaneously released in both Standard and Server versions) has definitely taken a big step forward in many areas.

Several elements of the full internal Mac OS X 10.6 code tree, such as the “Marble” interface revamp and overhauled Finder as well as the entire PowerPC version of the operating system, continue to be withheld from the developer builds — but even absent those more visible features, Snow Leopard is truly beginning to shine and show full potential with the advent of 10A335.

Performance is a notable area of big improvement since build 314 was released at the beginning of April; already stunningly fast, sources confirm that 335 removes a significant amount of debug code which always bogs down developmental versions of OS X as compared to their final-release counterparts. Read more

Despite the previous build of Mac OS X 10.5.7 code-name “Juno” appearing nearly ready for release within days (it’s now been over a week), Apple has delivered a new seed — build 9J56 — to developers, and it looks like a little bit of work still remains before we’ll see 10.5.7 in Software Update.

From Apple’s build notes on 9J56, the following headline changes were highlighted for developers to test against:

Fixed an issue when a process is killed or crashes while using AFP

Bluetooth compatibility and stability fixes

Crash reports missing application’s short version info fix

Crash log file missing machine’s name fix

Fixed an issue with Personal File Sharing where an AFP volume was not a valid Time Machine backup disk

Although these seem relatively minor, set against the full “Juno” project changelist which is nearly 200 items long at this point (and doesn’t include subtle tweaks of relatively little interest to third party developers for whom the change logs are written)….of particular note is the focus on Bluetooth in this build. Read more